The Free Market, The Public Sector, and What Should Government Do?

A major and perhaps the greatest problem with the purist libertarian position -- that the ideal government should only stop crime, enforce contracts, and protect us from outside threats -- is summed up in the aphorism "To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The Cold Warriors who wrote The Ugly American were quite ready to celebrate smart applications of violence. But they had quite a list of things for which the U.S. needed something other than that hammer with which to fight the Communist powers, and blamed much of our failure up to that time to our lack of capacity and willingness to use imaginative non-military methods to push back against the Communists. They pointed out things that the enemy did, like having embassy staff that knew the local language and lived much like the locals, like running schools in Southeast Asian countries teaching the skills people needed most -- a sort of Soviet Peace Corps 10 years before the U.S. tried that. The Communists seemed to value provision of peaceful benefits, as much as they valued the ability to pull off vicious underhanded dirty tricks, and both served them well, while U.S. policy-makers seemed to only envy their efficiency and freedom from scruples. It is a shame the title "Ugly American" became a byword for something that only played a small part in the book -- American boorishness. It was much more about lack of imagination (to use something besides the hammer) and common sense together with the ability to connect to people of dramatically different culture.

Turning to the aim of domestic peace -- consider what I heard recently about the California prison system, where the philosophy of only punishing and stopping criminals basically robbed it of effectiveness once all training and educational programs were stripped away (need to expand this). In the TV series The Wire, you had policemen and women with a very deep understanding of criminals as human beings, but not any less "tough" as a result. You had people fighting crime with a very effective combination of force and of empathy (dare we say even love, at times -- consider "Bunny", the black police commander who adopted a young man who had seemed to be on the road to viciousness).

The idea of the "empathetic warrior" has always been deeply interesting to me, from the imaginary "Caine" of the "Kung Fu" series (a naive fantasy I admit) to Joseph Stilwell, they have fascinated me. It is the opposite of the idea that when fighting something, you must treat the people who embody that thing (e.g. criminality or the Communist ideal/delusion) as embodiments of evil to be crushed. It calls for the ability to imagine that they could be something else. This includes the interrogator, like David Alexander (How to Break a Terrorist) who can "turn" an Islamic terrorist rather than (usually futilely) trying to beat information out of him.

I have to face head-on the idea that there is something "parental" about this attitude, and that is just what many people abhor (i.e. the "nanny state"). But all of the bad parenting in the world doesn't invalidate the idea of taking responsibility for children with compassion and force when needed. And all of the stupidities and crimes perpetrated by governments and parties in the name of dreams of a better world (whether that "better world" is a socialist or free market ideal) do not invalidate the idea of a community somehow acting in a collective fashion to try to promote the welfare of its individuals with compassion, imagination, and at times, but as little as possible, force.

Most people, though they may sing the praises of freedom (Burke "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze"; Johnson's "yelps"), know this on some level, but then their minds get stuck in some particular rather perverse image of what that looks like -- one that reassures individuals that it is not their responsibility and none of their business -- a simplistic view of the "benevolent dictator". It might be Winston Churchill not preventing the bombing of some town so that the Germans would not discover their intelligence leak, or the Colonel played by Jack Nicholson shouting "You can't handle the truth". I'm sure that Soviet era Russian textbooks could provide many more such romantically tinged vignettes of leaders making "the hard decisions", but why dwell so much on such examples. I suspect there is some kind of agenda, maybe conscious or maybe not, behind the propagation of such images.